SIR Publications

From the very beginning, scientific publishing has been an activity at the core of SSE and the Stockholm School of Economics Institute for Research (SIR). The publishing of our researchers’ results have continued to be a main concern for the Institute.

Research publications are distributed by Stockholm School of Economics Institute for Research (SIR) and can be ordered as described below.​

Order SIR Publications

Invoice Order The invoice will be sent together with the publication. The amount due should be paid to our bank account in Sweden within 30 days.

Managing Digital Transformation

Digitalization disrupts markets. Changes in power and structures in a fast-paced environment demands strategic and insightful change. A change leaders must act upon.

The impact upon organisations is multi-dimensional and profound, affecting both internal and external processes and structures in new and unexpected ways. This book serves as a tool to support managers and other stakeholders in pursuing digital transformation. An inspiring collection of chapters from 27 scholars across various academic disciplines provide several insights, frameworks, and perspectives that will help you leverage and govern organisational change and digital transformation.

This inspiring collection of current research can assist you in facing key challenges in today’s organisations, in the quest to adapt to ever-evolving business environments. This book examines new demands and behaviours, and discusses how businesses need to adapt and re-organise in order to bridge the gap to the digital customer. These visions and actions on digitalization can help corporations and organisations discover new ways of earning money and delivering value.

Institutional Investors in Swedish Corporate Governance

The main contribution of this book is empirical. The three studies included all contribute to the relatively limited extant evidence on the governance role played by different classes of institutional investors in a market characterized by shareholder-oriented governance, such as the Swedish one, in particular by considering the role of the shareholder-constituted nomination committee. The first study shows how the domestic traditional institutional investors active on the Swedish market have had an impact on the governance of listed firms by demonstrating that their involvement in the nomination committees are related to subsequent increases in the proportion of women directors. The second study shows how activist hedge funds also engage, but that the end result of their involvement in investee firms tend to be a takeover. The third study, meanwhile, suggests that foreign traditional institutional investors appear more disinclined to engage in governance matters, as evidenced e.g. by their reluctance to participate in the nomination committees of listed firms. As such, there appear to be clear differences in the level of governance engagement between classes of institutional investors as well as the firm-level effects of this engagement.

Mikael Ehne pursued doctoral studies at the Stockholm School of Economics from the end of 2013 until April 2018 when he passed away. Mikael’s conscientious work on the importance and role of institutional investors in Swedish corporate governance had come a long way and was the object of final revisions with the supervisory committee. In line with the express will of his immediate family, his manuscript for a dissertation is now published posthumously.

Sustainable Development and Business

Markus Kallifatides and Lin Lerpold (eds.)

Sustainable development has a long history with many different roots. The most widely agreed upon definition, ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’, includes the three main pillars of economic growth, environmental protection and social equality. Recognizing the tradeoffs and the difficulties in operationalizing the definition, the different chapters in this volume reflect different aspects of the pillars. The twelve chapters, illustrating different roots in research on sustainable development and business, can all be connected to an interpretation of the seminal modern definition.

What if economic growth is inherently unsustainable? What if economic growth, as hitherto defined, is not possible while respecting planetary boundaries and the social capacity of human beings? And what if further economic growth is not achievable under any circumstances, at least in the affluent parts of the world? Moreover, as many sustainability researchers have posited, there may be inherent conflict between development in the socioeconomic and natural worlds.

We do not claim to know exactly how to answer these observations from the outset. However, we do claim that in our times it would seem wise to maintain an open mind about most things, including how the production of goods and services for human consumption may be organized while leaving the planet in (at least) habitable condition for future generations. ‘Business as usual’ in the legacy of Adam Smith’s benefits of the ‘invisible hand’ may not be a wise choice in a world of refugee crises, climate change, biodiversity loss and persistent poverty among a growing world population. We suggest that ultimately neither ‘citizenship as usual’ nor ‘research as usual’ are viable options.

In this volume the authors describe how corporate governance takes place in practice in large Nordic companies. The empirical results and conclusions are based on an extensive in-depth study of 36 mid- and large cap corporations involving some 250 owners, board members (including Chairs), and CEOs. Three major conclusions can be drawn from the rich material.

• Firstly, the authors show that a company’s total ownership situation to a large extent determines how the governance process is organized and executed. The ownership dimension that matters most is its structure (concentrated or fragmented shareholding). However, whether a corporation is owned privately or by the state also matters, as does the personality of the controlling/main owner (e.g., risk seeker or risk averse) and the owner’s personal involvement in the operational and financial flows (i.e., contribution to the different corporate bodies). All those governance qualities are crucial in the Nordic environment, where most corporations tend to have controlling/main shareholders.

• Secondly, it is obvious that each corporation has the opportunity to ‘tailor’ its own governance process and that the owners actually also use that possibility. Such an option exists because the Nordic Company Laws allow considerable degrees of freedom in terms of interpretation, and the complementary soft regulations are not binding.

• Thirdly, the empirical material in this extensive study lends support to the notion that what is really decisive for how the different corporations develop over time is how ownership control is captured, organized and executed. Thus, of particular importance is which owners control a company and how they act, that is, what ideas, competences, time horizons and ways of thinking dominate the governance process.

On Strategy and Competitiveness: 10 Recipes for Analytical Success

Örjan Sölvell
Learn to analyze a complex world: why did Nokia crash in the mobile segment? Why does not Volvo trucks deliver the profitability that was promised? Why is it so hard to change strategy in our business? Why did Stockholm become a world-class cluster in the digital industries?
These and other questions you will get help to analyze with Örjan Sölvells’ new "Cook book" including 10 recipes for strategy analysis.

Do you wrestle with issues like:

Why is it that firms often seem »stuck« on a certain strategy? Why are we stuck? What are the opportunities to shift our strategy?

How should I go about developing an entry strategy into a new industry or a new geographical market?

How can I grasp global competition? Is competition in our industry local, or multi-domestic or global? What can change that in the near future?

Why do firms with a global strategy succeed or fail the in the light of industry competition?

Why do firms based in certain business environments develop world leading products and services, while firms based in other business environments do not?

What is the role – if any – of local clusters in today’s global economy and global markets and value chains?

How can we improve the dynamics of our cluster? What is the value of engaging in improving our cluster? Who should be involved?

Why are not all industry agglomerations as dynamic as Silicon Valley­? What does it take to tap into a leading cluster?

How should we organize and specialize different subsidiary units in our global corporation?

How should we organize innovation and product development in our global firm?

Read this cookbook. Use the Recipes and get inspiration and hands-on support!

This is Lean

Pär Åhlström and Niklas Modig
This is Lean proves the phrase “creating more value by working less” to be a realistic and logical way to run your business. How?

By introducing the efficiency paradox – a brand new way of looking at efficiency. The authors, Professor Pär Åhlström and researcher Niklas Modig, presents what is referred to as the most concise, wise, easy-to-grasp and fun-to-read book on

Research in Brief: Forskning i Fickformat

An important aspect of SIR's mission is to support our researchers in the dissemination of their findings and in their contribution to public debate. Forskning i Fickformat, »Research in Brief«, is a series of Swedish language booklets produced in collaboration with PwC Sweden, the audit, accounting and advisory firm. The objective is to present current research in a brief and accessible format, in order to reach a wider audience. Each booklet is written by a researcher addressing the topic of his or her research.